Seven Miles to Arden Part 13

In one she came upon a suit of familiar white flannels; and she pa.s.sed them slowly--so slowly that her hands brushed them with a friendly little greeting. But the search was a barren one, and she returned to the porch as empty-handed and as mystified as she had left it; the heap of ashes on the hearth held no meaning for her, and consequently told no tales.

"'Tis plain enough what's happened," she said, soberly, to the sparrows who were skirmis.h.i.+ng for crumbs. "Just as I said, he was fearsome of those constables, after all, and he's escaped in my clothes!"

The picture of the tinker's bulk trying to disguise itself behind anything so scanty as her shrunken garments proved too irresistible for her sense of humor; she burst into peal after peal of laughter which left her weak and wet-eyed and dispelled her loneliness like fog before a clearing wind.

"Anyhow, if he hasn't worn them he's fetched them away as a wee souvenir of an O'Connell; and if I'm to reach Arden in any degree of decency 'twill have to be in stolen clothes."

But she did not go in the blue frock; the realization came to her promptly that that was no attire for the road and an unprotected state; she must go with dull plumage and no beguiling feathers. So she searched again, and came upon a blue-and-white "middy" suit and a dark-blue "Norfolk." The exchange brought forth the veriest wisp of a sigh, for a woman's a woman, on the road or off it; and what one has not a marked preference for the more becoming frock?

Patsy proved herself a most lawful housebreaker. She tidied up and put away everything; and the shutter having already been replaced over the broken window by the runaway tinker, she turned the k.n.o.b of the Yale lock on the front door and put one foot over the threshold.

It was back again in an instant, however; and this time it was no lawful Patsy that flew back through the hall to the mantel-shelf.

With the deftness and celerity of a true housebreaker she de-framed the tinker and stuffed the photograph in the pocket of her stolen Norfolk.

"Sure, he promised his company to Arden," she said, by way of stilling her conscience. Then she crossed the threshold again; and this time she closed the door behind her.

The sun was inconsiderately overhead. There was nothing to indicate where it had risen or whither it intended to set; therefore there was no way of Patsy's telling from what direction she had come or where Arden was most likely to be found. She shook her fist at the sun wrathfully. "I'll be bound you're in league with the tinker; 'tis all a conspiracy to keep me from ever making Arden, or else to keep me just seven miles from it. That's a grand number--seven."

A glint of white on the gra.s.s caught her eye; she stooped and found it to be a diminutive quill feather dropped by some pa.s.sing pigeon.

It lay across her palm for a second, and then--the whim taking her--she shot it exultantly into the air. Where it fell she marked the way it pointed, and that was the road she took.

It was beginning to seem years ago since she had sat in Marjorie Schuyler's den listening to Billy Burgeman's confession of a crime for which he had not sounded in the least responsible. That was on Tuesday. It was now Friday--three days--seventy-two hours later. She preferred to think of it in terms of hours--it measured the time proportionally nearer to the actual feeling of it. Strangely enough, it seemed half a lifetime instead of half a week, and Patsy could not fathom the why of it. But what puzzled her more was the present condition of Billy Burgeman, himself. As far as she was concerned he had suddenly ceased to exist, and she was pursuing a Balmacaan coat and plush hat that were quite tenantless; or--at most--they were supported by the very haziest suggestion of a personality. The harder she struggled to make a flesh-and-blood man therefrom the more persistently did it elude her--slipping through her mental grasp like so much quicksilver. She tried her best to picture him doing something, feeling something--the simplest human emotion--and the result was an absolute blank.

And all the while the shadow of a very real man followed her down the road--a shadow in grotesquely flapping rags, with head flung back. A dozen times she caught herself listening for the tramp of his feet beside hers, and flushed hotly at the nagging consciousness that pointed out each time only the mocking echo of her own tread. Like the left-behind cottage, the road became unexpectedly lonely and discouraging.

"The devil take them both!" she sputtered at last. "When one man refuses to be real at all, and the other pesters ye with being too real--'tis time to quit their company and let them fetch up where and how they like."

But an O'Connell is never a quitter; and deep down in Patsy's heart was the determination to see the end of the road for all three of them--if fate only granted the chance.

She came to a cross-roads at length. She had spied it from afar and hailed it as the end of her troubles; now she would learn the right way to Arden. But Patsy reckoned without chance--or some one else.

The sign-boards had all been ripped from their respective places on a central post and lay propped up against its base. There was little information in them for Patsy as she read: "Petersham, five miles; Lebanon, twelve miles; Arden, seven miles--"

The last sign went spinning across the road, and Patsy dropped on a near-by stone with the anguish of a great tragedian. "Seven miles--seven miles! I'm as near to it and I know as much about it as when I started three days ago. Sure, I feel like a mule, just, on a treadmill, with Billy Burgeman in the hopper."

A feeling of utter helplessness took possession of her; it was as if her experiences, her actions, her very words and emotions, were controlled by an unseen power. Impulse might have precipitated her into the adventure, but since her feet had trod the first stretch of the road to Arden chance had sat somewhere, chuckling at his own comedy--making, while he pulled her hither and yon, like a marionette on a wire. Verily chance was still chuckling at the incongruity of his stage setting: A girl pursuing a strange man, and a strange sheriff pursuing the girl, and neither having an inkling of the pursuit or the reason for it.

On one thing her mind clinched fast, however: she would at least sit where she was until some one came by who could put her right, once and for all; rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief--she would stop whoever came first.

The arpeggio of an automobile horn brought her to her feet; the next moment the machine careened into sight and Patsy flagged it from the middle of the road, the lines of her face set in grim determination.

"Would you kindly tell me--" she was beginning when a girl in the tonneau cut her short:

"Why, it's Patsy O'Connell! How in the name of your blessed Saint Patrick did you ever get so far from home?"

The car was full of young people, but the girl who had spoken was the only one who looked at all familiar. Patsy's mind groped out of the present into the past; it was all a blind alley, however, and led nowhere.

The girl, seeing her bewilderment, helped her out. "Don't you remember, I was with Marjorie Schuyler in Dublin when you were all so jolly kind to us? I'm Janet Payne--those awful 'Spitsburger Paynes'"--and the girl's laugh rang out contagiously.

The laugh swept Patsy's mind out into the open. She reached out and gripped the girl's hand. "Sure, I remember. But it's a long way from Dublin, and my memory is slower at hearkening back than my heart. A brave day to all of you." And her smile greeted the carful indiscriminately.

"Oh!"--the girl was apologetic--"how beastly rude I am! I'm forgetting that you don't know everybody as well as everybody knows you. Jean Lewis, Mrs. Dempsy Carter, Dempsy Carter, Gregory Jessup, and Jay Clinton--Miss Patricia O'Connell, of the Irish National Players. We are all very much at your service--including the car, which is not mine, but the Dempsy Carters'."

"Shall we kidnap Miss O'Connell?" suggested the owner. "She appears an easy victim."

Janet Payne clapped her hands, but Patsy shook a decided negative.

"That's the genius of the Irish," she laughed; "they look easy till you hold them up. I'm bound for Arden, and must make it by the quickest road if you'll point it out to me."

"Why, of course--Arden; that accounts for you perfectly. Stupid that I didn't think of it at once. What part are you playing?" Janet Payne accompanied the question with unmistakable eagerness.

Patsy shot a shrewd glance at the girl. Was she indulging in good-natured banter, or had she learned through Marjorie Schuyler of Patsy's self-imposed quest, and was seeking information in figurative speech? Patsy decided in favor of the former and answered it in kind: "Faith! I'm not sure whether I've been cast for the duke's daughter--or the fool. I can tell ye better after I reach Arden." And she turned abruptly as if she would be gone.

But the girl held her back. "No, you don't. We are not going to lose you like that. We'll kidnap you, as Dempsy suggested, till after lunch; then we'll motor you back to Arden. You'll get there just about as soon."

Patsy had not the slightest intention of yielding; her mind and her feet were braced against any divergence from the straight road now; but the man Janet Payne had called Gregory Jessup said something that scattered her resolutions like so much chaff.

"You've simply got to come, Miss O'Connell." And he leaned over the side of the car in boyish enthusiasm. "Last summer Billy Burgeman used to read to me the parts of Marjorie's letters that told about you, and they were great! We were making up our minds to go to Ireland and see if you were real when your company came to America.

After that Marjorie would never introduce us after the plays, just to be contrary. You wouldn't have the heart to grudge us a little acquaintances.h.i.+p now, would you?"

"Billy Burgeman," repeated Patsy. "Do you know him?"

Dempsy Carter interposed. "They're chums, Miss O'Connell. I'll wager there isn't a soul on earth that knows Billy as well as Greg does."

"That's hard on Marjorie, isn't it?" asked Janet Payne.

"Oh, hang Marjorie!" The sincerity of Gregory Jessup's emotion somewhat excused his outburst.

"Why, I thought they were betrothed!" Patsy looked innocent.

"They were. What they are now--Heaven only knows! Marjorie Schuyler has gone to China, and Billy has dropped off the face of the earth."

A sudden silence fell on the cross-roads. It was Patsy who broke it at last. "Well?" A composite, interrogative stare came from the carful. Patsy laughed bewitchingly. "For a crowd of rascally kidnappers, you are the slowest I ever saw. Troth, in Ireland they'd have it done in half the time."

The next instant Patsy was lifted bodily inside, and, amid a general burst of merriment, the car swung down the road.

It was a picnic lunch--an elaborate affair put up in a hamper, a fireless cooker, and a thermos basket; and it was spread on a tiny, fir-covered peninsula jutting out into a diminutive lake. It was an enchanting spot and a delicious lunch, with good company to boot; but, to her annoyance, Patsy found herself continually comparing it unfavorably with a certain vagabond breakfast garnished with yellow lady's-slippers, musicianed by throstles, and served by a tinker.

"Something is on your mind, or do you find our American manners and food too hard to digest comfortably?" Gregory Jessup had curled up unceremoniously at her feet, balancing a caviar sandwich, a Camembert cheese, and a bottle of ale with extraordinary dexterity.

"I was thinking about--Billy Burgeman."

He cast a furtive look toward the others beyond them. They seemed engrossed for the moment in some hectic discussion over fas.h.i.+ons, and he dropped his voice to a confidential pitch: "I can't talk Billy with the others; I'm too much cut up over the whole thing to stand hearing them hold an autopsy over Billy's character and motives." He stopped abruptly and scanned Patsy's face. "I believe a chap could turn his mind inside out with you, though, and you'd keep the contents as faithfully as a safe-deposit vault."

Patsy smiled appreciatively. "Faith! you make me feel like Saint Martin's chest that Satan himself couldn't be opening."

"What did he have in it?"

"Some good Christian souls."